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Isaac King's avatar

> Lawyers are notoriously allergic to linguistic ambiguity, as evidenced by the sheer cliffs of verbosity present within dense and convoluted legislation and statutory codes.

I'm surprised to hear you have this impression. Whenever I try to read a legal document I rapidly get frustrated at how incredibly vague it is, or how they define things in inane ways, like the "bees are fish" example. The latter could have been avoided by simply referring to a well-established biological definition of "fish", but this was not done presumably because it wouldn't seem "official enough", or they actually wanted to smuggle non-fish creatures into the category.

As someone used to reading formal texts like math and code, legal text strikes me as of a different kind entirely. It's not trying to actually *be* rigorous and unambiguous, it's trying to *appear* complicated with pointless jargon (similar to a lot of academic papers nowadays), so as to intimidate the common man into not pointing out how stupid it is, and allowing legislators to later argue for an interpretation that they wouldn't want to argue for when getting the bill passed.

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Steersman's avatar

Interesting that your link to Alexander's post is to a Less Wrong article of some 12 years ago -- any more recent discussions? Has he responded yet to your emailing him of your previous post?

In any case, nice example of the composition and division fallacies. Apropos of which, you might be interested in a case of the former from Helen Joyce:

HJ: "And if you're a mammal every part of your body is female ... but you know my hands are female my jaw is female ..."

She might just as well assert that if she was still a teenager then every part of her body is a teenager; similarly, that every part of her body is a vertebrate because she, presumably, has a spine.

https://substack.com/@humanuseofhumanbeings/note/c-21582743

Rather disconcerting position to take for someone ostensibly "trained" as a mathematician. Whole transgender issue and related dogma has corrupted the "thinking" of too many people -- or at least draw attention to their "cognitive distortions".

But, speaking of Alexander and Joyce and "white hats" with clay feet, you might also be interested in, or amused by, Scott's "defenestration" of me, apparently for challenging his inclusion of transwomen in the "women" cohort of his survey:

Steersman: "But my point is that Scott's presumed inclusion of a large percentage of males in the female cohort is going to give a false reading of the magnitude of that effect. Hardly an 'unbiased' sample."

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/x-fact-check-does-gender-integration/comment/49768681

SA: "Banned for unnecessarily making this about their opinions of trans people. I won't ban other people who debate transgender in relevant threads."

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/x-fact-check-does-gender-integration/comment/55522545

Blocked me to boot; kind of a "so let it be written, so let it be done" anathematization. Though I suppose I should be thankful that he at least hasn't deleted all of my comments -- rather large number of people -- "women" for the most part for some strange unfathomable 'reason' but still supposedly on the "right side of history" -- who get quite "peeved" when one challenges their articles of faith. A couple of examples, a pair of lawyers in fact ... 😉🙂:

https://alessandraasteriti.substack.com/p/reviewing-the-cass-review/comment/54398724

https://sarahphillimore.substack.com/p/my-first-space-how-did-it-go/comment/39281981

Rather "demented" idea that sex is "immutable". It is not just the transgendered who've turned the sexes into identities rather than labels for transitory reproductive abilities.

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